Science Memes

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submitted 7 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (2 children)

It's an unfortunate false friend that the German word Gift means poison in English.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

Funnily there is also the word "Mitgift" (Dowry) that has nothing to do with poison at all and is closer to the english "gift".

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

Same root though. In Dutch it wasn't differentiated until recently so the same word has vastly different meanings between Afrikaans and Dutch. https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/gifte#Middle_Low_German

Original meaning seems to be something that was given. So a snake would gift you Poison just like snot nosed brats would gift you a cold during Thanksgiving dinner.

Same meaning as dose in that sense. https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/dosis#Latin

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago

The word has been used as a euphemism for "poison" since Old High German, a semantic loan from Late Latin dosis (“dose”), from Ancient Greek δόσις (dósis, “gift; dose of medicine”).

I wondered how the heck it got that meaning. Pretty strange to apply a term for giving something in general to poison specifically.